Kabali director Pa.Ranjith to make his Bollywood debut

Chennai:Pa.Ranjith is to debut in Bollywood with a biopic on tribal leader Birsa Munda.

Ranjith, 35, directed Rajinikanth in
Kabaliand
Kaala. He was also involved in activism by extending solidarity to Dalit issues and lending his voice for the release of seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.

Ranjith is lately occupied in the preliminary work for his Bollywood debut which is going to be a debut on Birsa Munda, the folk hero belonging to the Munda tribe who spearheaded a movement against the British Raj in the late 19th century. The project, reports suggest, is to be bankrolled by Namah Pictures which produced Majid Majidi’s Beyond the Clouds.

The cast and crew for the movie have not been decided yet.

Incidentally, director Gopi Nainar has also decided to work on a biopic on Birsa Munda, but in Tamil. Some reports here recall Ranjith’s political drama
Madras (2014) which sparked a controversy over allegations that it was lifted from Gopi Nainar’s unfinished project
Karuppar Nagaram. But that is past.

Although Ranjith has worked with Rajinikanth, when it comes to politics, the latter is widely considered to be closer to BJP. But Ranjith met Rahul Gandhi in July this year and discussed the threat posed by the current dispensation at the Centre to the secular fabric of the country. Ranjith’s tweet at the time said, “discussed caste and religious bias threatening the core of our secular constitution."